


The Pyrrhic Tongue, the Eyes Undone

by rosekay



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Dubious Consent, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Season/Series 03, Slash, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-11-29
Updated: 2011-11-29
Packaged: 2017-10-26 16:00:21
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,417
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/285158
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rosekay/pseuds/rosekay
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Put your brother on a leash if you want to keep him."  Samuel goes to war. Diverges post-S3 finale.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Pyrrhic Tongue, the Eyes Undone

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted to LJ in 2008.

 

Sam finally calls Gordon to him in the third year of the war. Ellen would have none of it, so he's left alone to finish each last symbol on the rotting wood floor, melting into the right angles, waiting for the right time, the right brew, before he lets the Latin tumble out of his mouth, harsh, cutting his tongue on the way out with sharp syllables and staccato rhythms. The cabin he'd chosen trembles, barely able to hold the power swelling so casually in its middle. He wonders if someone looking in from the outside would see the sickly yellow light pulsing in time to his voice, sense the _not-of-here_ , the shift of worlds. It's familiar to him now, but that slopping slipslide still crawls under his skin uncomfortably just as it did the first time, worming its way through muscle and bone like a whisper in his flesh. Sam doesn't like reaching into hell. You never know what will bite.

\--

It's Jo who leaves him first, sweet Jo with her newly shorn hair and practical boots, the delicate curve of her cheeks like a child's. She smells like she’s been on the road; there are lines in her face that he put there, a map of things that have been done. He can read her intention in the way her hands curl, soft skin over her mother's steel.

"I miss him too, Sam."

And that's when he almost lashes out, has to dig his nails in deep to keep from moving, tension thrumming through his shoulders. He remembers the time when Meg ate him up inside, if only a little, remembers Jo like a golden bird crushed beneath him, how delicate her racing pulse, how fragile the creak of her little bones. He can imagine what a blow would do to her pretty worn-thin face now, and it makes him sick inside that the thought comes so quickly, so painlessly. She's brave, even though she has to sense where he is, balancing on the knife's edge of propriety, of rightness, because she only moves closer, folding herself next to him, small callused hand grazing his shoulder. Sam shakes. His teeth hurt.

"Sam," she says, and when he looks up, he realizes he was wrong, that the roundness has gone out of her face at last, no child here, but a gaunt woman with hollow eyes dark as the choking night rising up around them. There's a small scar by her mouth she never had before and creases by her eyes, like she spends her time studying things, not really knowing them. _I wash my hands of you_ , she's saying, however gently.

She used to wear short skirts, he remembers, pale skinny legs flashing from beneath the apron, so Dean -

"Jo." He doesn't even recognize his own voice, imagines it must rumble through her fingers that have risen to his face. Brave Jo.

"You tried, Sam."

_You tried._

\--

Gordon is blood and fangs and gnarled flesh, spit flying when he throws himself at Sam, trapped by runes. He has little of the calm that defined him before, the eerie stillness of certainty, something John had mastered, something Dean had admired. A little ragged now, caught in whatever had got him below. It made him strong, all clean lines and pure thought, a voice that charmed, even and paced. His unfettered state now is all the more unsettling. Sam does not know the semantics of a vampiric soul descending into hell, but it doesn't look pleasant. Gordon rolls the whites of his eyes at him, a deep growl rising from his belly, low and inhuman. But when they focus on him, yellow discs, the white all gone in the animal motion, they are intent, calculating. Sam swallows and steels himself.

The laugh that creaks out from a bloodied throat echoes like machinery stripping gears. It makes his teeth clench.

"Sammy." Another laugh.

Sam doesn't respond, just waits.

"I know what you're looking for." Gordon shakes his head, makes a sound, and looks down, the curve of his smile dragging his face up. Sam has to stop himself from starting forward.

"You think time passes the same, where we are?" Gordon cocks his head, and Sam can sense it before it comes, the intended cruelty. "It's too late, Sammy. I guess I was wrong, which one of you would be the monster first."

"Shut up," Sam rages right against the rim of his own chalk, brutally set, almost close enough to get caught. It's not like the fear didn't rest in his throat for three, long years, but the reality is ice in his belly, fire in his veins. His eyes hurt, and he rubs his temples, Gordon's words still bright behind his eyelids. And the words don't stop, because Gordon has no reason to appear normal now, to draw a mask over himself so the world won't stare too hard. They tumble out like he’s forgotten how to control his throat, an odd stopstart rhythm that he’d never had before, but edged with the steel that had always maddened Sam.

"He was pretty when he first came down, Sammy. You heard all this, right, how it's a prison? Blood and fire, flesh and bone? Old dogs like new meat, all fresh and pale and _shaking_ from above. How long do you think those big green eyes lasted, Sammy boy? I didn't get first dibs, not high enough on the food chain no, but there was still some left when I got there. Lots a people in line. You boys are prime property down there, and he built some grudges, your brother - they could hardly _wait_ to have him. He tasted good, all sloppy and sore and hoarse. You know the thing about not having a body down there? A _real_ one? Anything can happen, again and again." Gordon shakes his head, loosens his shoulders, eyes sliding closed in remembered bliss. "Tight, he felt tight, he _felt_ \- "

Sam doesn't see his foot cross the line, doesn't _care_. His heart's locked up, blood pounding. His fingers feel good around Gordon's throat, the cross digging into his palm, but sizzling nicely. He just squeezes and squeezes, remembering the delirious joy of Gordon's first death, seeing Gordon's teeth in his brother's _neck_ , full of his brother's blood. That was nothing to this, how he feels now, how he _can't_ feel now. The words were plainly meant to hurt, he knows, to stab under his skin and leave him unsettled, vulnerable, but they are things he can't hear. That no one should about someone they -

Gordon's eyes widen as he struggles. "How -?"

Sam leans close, feels the bones begin to snap beneath his hands, the not-flesh sizzling against the cross, essence slipping out like smoke beneath his fingers. It feels good, but not good enough.

"I learned a few new tricks, Gordon."

"Sammy," Gordon rasps, but he's too proud to bow his head and whimper, just holds Sam's gaze, stubborn to the end.

"Tell me, tell me _how._ "

\--

Bobby says, "Do you know what you're doing?"

Sam puts the book down, his fingers still stroking the pages, nails ink blackened. His head hurts again.

"Sam," Bobby sighs, sitting down heavily. "Your hands - "

They are more veined than they should be, blood running black in patterns along the backs of his hands. They ache these days, when he has to use them, but that's the price of experience. A lot of things hurt strangely, feel better, stronger, more terrifying, but he rarely lets his mind linger there.

"Bobby."

He never had that gift before, shutting people up with a word, a tone, but it comes easily to him now, maybe with something more than just his voice.

Bobby isn't quite silent, still looks at him the way he used to when Sam was a little boy, had just let the dog out at the wrong time. Sam bends back over the book. His eyes burn.

\--

At first, he thinks the ritual didn't work, but the reports start rolling in soon enough. A new power after Lilith's fall, they say, someone old, just escaped, someone new, biding his time. Deaths, brutal, uncontrolled.

Ellen says, "Sam, have you thought- "

He leaves the room before she can finish, the map of the dying world clutched in his hands. This was the _one_ thing, the one thing, that had to work. He would have thrown everything else to the wind to get it. He blows past the door, ignoring the stares.

He knows that he disturbs other hunters now, prickles up their spines, shivering his way into their minds, that the rumors never die, that they see something feral when they look into his eyes. Jo used to try to rein him in, hand on his arm, telling him, hunch your shoulders, play Sam again, but he all but snaps his jaws at them now, grinning. They have no choice but to follow him, to trust him. He's the only one, and his are the only people, who have been anything but mowed down and slaughtered since the world was flush with things below. They need him, and the Gordons are long gone to hell themselves.

 

\--

 

Sam finds him at a crossroads, which is almost too much to bear, but it’s no summoning, Sam knows. He knew if he dangled himself long enough, the predator would come. A meeting of powers, a crackling atmosphere, that attracts all sorts of things these day. His eyes burn, palms sweating into his pants when he rolls his neck, trying to gain some sort of purchase. He's been waiting for this for too long, every nerve keyed to receive this moment. The moon is barely a white sliver above, swallowed by an inky night, and Sam feels the pause in the wind, the way it _dies_ curling around his face, like someone yanked it back to mother's womb, slaughtered it before it was ever born. His mouth is dry and sour, the prickle of sweat along the back of his neck and damp and uncomfortable. But he doesn't move, just waits.

Dean makes Sam's heart clench, moving too fast and too slow. When the bars of moonlight settle on his form, Dean's face looks clear at him, Dean's hands and Dean's straight body, but his eyes are wide and dark and liquid, piercing something inside Sam he didn't know could hurt quite this much, all the worse because they rest in his own face. He looks not himself, oddly vulnerable with his eyes all large and inky, so hollow in familiar geography, same high forehead, sweep of cheekbones, the straight and brutal jaw. He doesn't speak, just cuts right up to Sam, something new and fluid and too quick in his walk, the way he moves not all flesh but something else.

Still not quite his brother's height, eyes tilted _up_ to meet Sam's. His skin feels like a fever against the thin barrier of Sam's shirt, and he almost has to shut his eyes, because Dean – this thing – has made no attempt to look. He presses himself close so Sam almost steps back but stops himself, closes his eyes and breathes in whatever faint, happy thing's beneath the sulfur. Then Dean's practically _nuzzling_ so his face fits perfectly, warm and treasured, into Sam's neck, and his arms come up without the hesitation that he'd had in life, a display of affection Sam's Dean would have saved for only the most dire moment. But it feels good, so good, and he can't move his hands, though his fingers close tight on the tiny cross, its sigils bright against his palm. It feels like something has released inside of him at last, something ugly and tight and leeching that has been building in his stomach for three years, made him a little more haggard, a little more wild, and he needed _this_ , _needs_ this. Dean. So much it curls out of him in a little sigh, shaky and relieved.

The pain at his back is bright, sharp. Surprises him into a hiss, and he pulls back automatically, but Dean's hands are locked against his spine, claws. Sam twists, wrenching both wrists into his grip, steel strong and bird bone fragile, so Dean is forced to stumble into him, his forearms hobbled, legs bent. His fingers look normal, human, blunt, but they smell like sulfur and Sam's blood, tipped with gore, and Dean is breathing hard, copper breath and white teeth bared, sucking breaths like a racehorse, or a hunting beast, settling for a kill. Sam breathes, resists the urge to touch his own back, assess the damage, but pain is already fading, just a memory of what he has in front of him now.

"Dean," he says, and the name feels like absolution, something he'd never allowed himself for years.

But the struggling thing in front of him barely looks up, its muscles wiry, collarbones sharp in the moonlight, eyes sucking the warm silver in until it's died in their depths.

\--

"You can't just _keep_ him," Bobby mutters, not even angry anymore, "trapped like a damn dog."

He looks old the way a father does, face tense. Sam doesn't look to the room where Dean sleeps, curled in on himself like an animal, surrounded by symbols ground into the floor, snuffling breaths and sharp little moans, like it hurts him to be in this world.

His tongue seems to swell so he can't speak, just puts his head in his hands, palms rubbing his temples.

"Bobby, I - "

He can feel the old man gentling, and there's a long silence before Bobby speaks again, one hand on his shoulder, the brim of his hat just a sliver in Sam's vision. "I know, Sam, I _know._ But you can't do this. That isn't your brother anymore. He's gone. You gotta put that thing back."

The war is heavy on his face, people lost and battles ahead, the way the world seems to melt into itself sometimes, red skies that don't quite fade. Sam feels the tug of regret, the vague wish that he could offer Bobby something better.

"We need you." Croaked out less sure than he’s ever heard. Sam is tired of demons. Knows them better than humans these days. Tired of his own half gnarled hands and the tension headaches, the certainty of death, but Bobby always makes him stop for a moment. Makes him remember.

It’s not enough. What he feels isn't anger, just surety. He knows he's come too far, knows that there is a thing he would never have given up, will never give up, no matter how the world bends and breaks and sinks. Bobby sees it, and his mouth thins. There's no energy for a tantrum or rage to siphon off. Sam is just silent, his hands clenched, still aching, the two of them silent in the wake of Dean's scrabbling struggles the room over, the sound of not-quite-flesh on wood and a ragged throat.

\--

The place he's prepared is secluded, a little house spelled and secured, every corner. He had to knock Dean out to bring him here, his mind wondering how much of the thing before him is real flesh. The way his brother crumpled still hurt him, but his closed eyes were a guilty relief, as if he would open them, thick lashes curtaining up, to a clear and loved green, so Sam could smile. He wrestles him out of the car, hand stroking smooth black again, a little calmer for the first time in a long time. When Sam heaves him up, his long throat is thrown back, vulnerable, bloody hands limp, and it's almost like those halcyon days when they just fought and ate and slept, patching each other up with stiff hands, crumpled food wrappers and lame jokes. They feel oddly innocent in his throat now, tightening it up. He adjusts, tightening his arm beneath Dean's knees, nudging his limp head with a shoulder. The house gives him a tingle as he crosses the threshold, whispering _it's safe, you did right_ the way all his runes feel these days, closer to him than blood.

He deposits Dean on the bed, watching his body slide onto the mattress, the way his lashes still fall thick onto his cheekbones, how his freckles haven't even changed, his pink mouth. Sits and waits for him to wake up.

\--

Sam wakes with a thick mouth, his back sore and sticky. He’s been dreaming of hellfire for years, but it unsettles him more today.

He checks on Dean, still asleep, pale and hollowed out, and goes into the little bathroom to wash himself slowly, warm washcloth where he can’t quite reach, breath hissing, then releasing the long one he’s held in himself for too long. He looks strange in the cracked mirror, hair too straggly, uncut, unshaven, every muscle standing out in the harsh light. He hasn’t had Dean in the house for three years, every one weighing sharp on his heart. It seems too easy, and so far from it, something weak and pewling curling up from his stomach to his throat till it’s tight and sore, his eyes watering, lashes clumping. White knuckles on the sink, and then he sighs, draws himself together, rinses the cloth and goes to air out the dusty corner of the house.

The Impala needs gas, so he takes her down long country roads, sour wind in his face, looking at the few faces in the passing windows, the abandoned houses, recent. The town still has the veneer of safety, something half cheerful in its winding streets. People don’t avoid his eyes as he drives past, nod at him as if everything’s fine.

He unlocks the rickety door with one hand, groceries balanced on his hip, miscellany of things to make the house less bare. The stillness is the first sign of something, and it takes getting into the kitchen to catch the snarls, whimpers and grunts with a metallic echo. Heart thumping, he edges open the door to Dean’s room, feels the wards giving, welcoming him in all smooth and knowing, a warm caress.

Dean is curled on his knees, his back bowed painfully, Sam’s shirt half torn off, the harsh knobs of his spine visible at the top of his neck. He rocks back and forth, terrible noises emerging from a ragged throat. Sam can see his fingertips bloody again, and the wounds he’s scored on his own skin. He can feel where the wards have almost given a little, from someone throwing themselves against them again and again. Dean’s head snaps up when he steps close, as if he scents blood and warm flesh, his eyes as dark and eerie as before, too large in his thin face. He has not said a word to Sam since he found him, and there are no words now, only noises, animal.

He makes himself step forward. “Dean.”

There’s nothing in those eyes, no changeable points of light and color, pupil and depth, that he used to read so easily.

He expects the lunge, getting his hand around Dean’s wrist and his throat, the thumb over his pulse point, quelling him, though there’s spit flecking his lips, the shirt ruined, and the signs of his own wounds over his jaw, throat, warms.

“ _Dean._ ” Sam shakes him like a rag doll until Dean calms, breath coming slower. His palm moves down to Dean’s chest, over his heart, where it would, should be, and maybe it’s only his mind that it takes too long to find that wild, fluttering beat. The touch seems to steady his brother, make his hitching, snarling breaths smaller. His face opens to Sam and he tucks himself in close.

Sam remembers the way Dean used to watch him when they were little, remembers the houses all linked now like beads on a chain, different colors, different kitchens, different states, but all made a little warmer with blood by his side. Dean was never more than proficient with a stove, but that was more than anyone could say for Sam or John. Now the memory comes sweet, sweeter, he knows, than he ever experienced it, made soft and wonderful by loss and time and hurt, of Dean’s hand on his forehead at four, at six, at twelve, rough voice spewing harsh things that didn’t reach his worried eyes. Sam used to fall asleep to that certainty. He lets Dean settle against his chest. Holds him.

\--

There’s a girl who delivers groceries now, because Sam can’t leave Dean alone without coming back to blood, a sleepless night. He remembers her from the store, a sort of plump small town prettiness, round attractive face and indistinct hair that shifts from straw to dark and back. She reminds him of Dean’s girls from before, the provincial waitresses and librarians and desk clerks who smiled for him and opened their lips, their legs. She’s shy around Sam, shy around his height. He tries to smile for her, but it feels brittle, unused. He’s not sure if he can do it anymore, the college grin, but she’s sweet. Amy. Her daddy’s truck and slender arms that are still strong enough to get the bags even though Sam offers to help.

She has a warm, flat voice that could be from any town but somehow says _here, now_ like a bell. It’s awful sweet, she says, that Sam takes care of his sick brother, that he cares. _Not enough of your kind of people in the world these days._ He wonders if she even knows the battle that’s being waged behind these people’s eyes, the way the world’s pulsing and hurt and torn in places while the Amys and their daddies turn their faces as they always have. _I thought it might change_ , Jo told him once, face serene despite her cracked voice.

Sam smiles at her, ignores her blushing cheeks and avoids her questions, but he learned a long time ago that things will always go wrong.

One day he gives Dean a sedative in the morning, drives out to town. A woman’s looking for you, Frank the bartender had said on the phone, voice hushed, won’t leave until you come. Then, lower, _she’s scaring off my customers, Sam, get down here._

He strokes Dean’s still forehead and gets in the car, muscles tense as piano wire. The drive seems short, scenery flying by, bland as sawdust in his mouth. It’s too soon when the buildings start clustering closer, the limits approaching. Too soon when he walks down the street, nods at the post guy who comes every so often with letters filled with Bobby’s neat hand and Ellen’s scrawl. Too soon when he gets hit with the sour smell of Frank’s bar, the dank light.

Her back is to him, but he knows her instantly, still wearing that long, blonde hair like a banner.

“Sam,” she smiles, eyes flickering just a little bit. She gets up, an untouched beer sweating on the counter.

Frank nods at him, mouth tense. It’s early afternoon, usually when the lunch break crowd is only just filtering out, but the place is practically deserted.

He hasn’t seen Ruby since Lilith, had left her to her demise there, and never looked back. She doesn’t appear to have taken it too badly by her smile, but it’s Ruby. The conversation’s short, brutal, nothing he hasn’t heard before.

“Get out,” says Sam.

There’s no answer, just a cocky lift of the brow that used to remind him of Dean.

“You can’t just keep him, Sam,” she hisses, and Bobby’s face is alive in his mind still.

“He’ll come calling for his property.”

Sam doesn’t run out, but it’s a close thing.

\--

The door is ajar when he gets back. Sam feels his stomach drop, hand automatically going for the gun at the back of his pants. He passes through the kitchen first, swearing at the sight of familiar brown bags scattered across the floors, a single red apple rolling to his feet when he jostles a bag by accident. Amy. He’d forgotten.

He hears them before he gets through the door, a girl’s voice all _please, please_ , filled with terror, and the lower, inhuman growl of a thing neither demon nor man. His brother. Who has Amy by one arm, curiously sniffing at the valley between her breasts, as if about to bite. Judging by the blood streaking her face, it’s not the first time.

“ _Dean_!” Sam thunders, bringing the gun to point without even thinking. Amy’s pretty eyes flick up, filled with tears, her open mouth a crying, drooling mess of fear and surprise. Her flesh is pale and round, the softness of a normal life. Next to Dean, whipcord lean and wild faced, she looks like nothing but prey.

His brother reacts to his voice, pausing in his attack. Sam watches his hand loosen on her arm, the skin slowly filling in the white prints with red. He takes his chance then, grabs her out of the room despite Dean’s snarled protest, whips his brother across the face, thoughtless, and drags Amy out of the room, the swears echoing in his head.

“What the hell, what – “ she begins, breathless, terrified, head canting back toward where Dean whimpers and snarls and growls. Sam bangs the door shut with one leg, hand coming up behind her neck. She freezes like a deer, knees banging together in fear, and the tears start again.

He’s getting a headache again, but he knows where to direct it, finds the place within himself, pulsing.

“Amy, forget it.”

“Sam?” A little girl’s voice, frightened.

“ _Forget it._ ”

He waves her goodbye in the truck. Her face looks only a little blank.

\--

Dean goes for his throat when he gets back to the room. Sam knocks him down again, half with whatever’s inside him, half with his hand. Dean goes because he’s still drowsy from the sedative, dosage that Sam had experimented with for weeks, unsure to how to take care of flesh that’s seen hellfire. There’s blood at Dean’s mouth. Amy’s. And all down the length of him. It looks like he clawed himself again first, sharpness that seems to rest in the space above his human fingers, made of something else altogether. Another bout for blood, and Sam wrestles him to his knees, hand at his throat. He lets his voice drop, echo with other things.

“ _Dean._ ”

And Dean, unbelievably, quells, dark eyes cast down. He looks almost himself again like that, if too thin, too wild. Sam lets the silence settle. One beat, two. And sighs, defeated.

"Let's get you cleaned up."

Dean’s eyes flicker up to him, unsure, and Sam tightens his mouth. He’s shy about his body in a way nonsensical, incongruous with the rest of him, as if Sam’s eyes on him will somehow cause naked skin to float away like so much dust. With the way things have been going, Sam thinks hysterically, he wouldn’t be surprised if that were the case.

But Dean still wears the darkening marks of his hands, the guilt of Amy’s fear, Sam’s guilt, and he doesn’t protest when Sam eases his own over-large shirt over his head. It ruffles his hair like a little boy’s, like the way Dean’s used to look when he just woke up. His eyes closed or an instant, Sam can almost imagine the years melting away, that’s everything’s the same as it was. His chest hurts.

He takes Dean’s bony wrist, leads him into the small bathroom, keeps an eye on him while the water runs.

With the shirt off, he looks half starved, every sinew standing out, as if all the human excess had been burned out of him, leaving bone and muscle and little else. Sam narrows his eyes when he sees the silvery scars, different from the ones he remembers. Those are gone, maybe forever. They look healed, but ugly, winding around Dean’s ribs up over his chest, what must have been deep gouges, to match the marks Sam had noticed before on his throat, the barely noticeable slashes at his cheek. He can barely speak when he eases the sweat pants over powerful, ridged hips, following the trail of damage to where it curls around Dean’s thighs, even his limp cock, all the way down his legs. Marks meant to hurt, to do more than bruise. Thick patches of healing that make his gorge rise, his rage too much used at this point to rouse a real reaction.

His whisper, cheek almost at Dean’s hip, is half a blessing.

“What did they do to you?”

It’s a stupid question, and he remembers Gordon’s words. They seem to echo in the room again, curling around the deliberation of his brother’s scars, the cruelty stamped in each slash and stab. Sam dips the washcloth in the warm water. Dean doesn’t like the water, shies away from the stove fire sometimes, never sleeps. He starts with his brother’s feet, the nails not all there but stiff with healing already, works the cloth up his tight calves, the strong thighs, and carefully, so carefully, around his genitals, quiescent in Dean’s silence. Those eerie black eyes just watch him, not protesting, but Dean’s expression is half afraid, tense, all too human.

He forces himself to focus on the parts, relearning this new version of his brother’s body, fingers stroking over sharp hips, moving up the dip and valley of each rib to the sparse hair over the still broad chest, over stubbled throat and sharp jaw, their father’s. It’s then that Dean speaks, opens his mouth for the first, slow and unafraid. The eerie rasp that emerges is only barely his voice, but the word is recognizable.

“Sam.”

And it’s then that Sam sees what Dean has hidden with his silence, the scarred wreckage of his tongue, just a stump in the raw insides of his mouth, like fire had licked up the sides, not real flame. Dean snaps his jaw shut at Sam’s look, turns away, another angry look. But it’s a _Dean_ look, like when he used to shy away from Sam’s ministrations after a bad hunt, away from Sam’s accusing words when Dad left them in the lurch.

He turns back, almost shy, and the sound is a terrible thing. Malformed, barely understandable, warped by flame and hurt and years below. _Sam._

Sam who slowly places his hands around his brother’s shoulders, pulls him close, and does not cry.

\--

Dean seems all scars and flesh. Sam has to prise his jaw open half the time to force the food down, fingers scraping themselves on sharp teeth, heart tripping along as muscle and sinew struggles in his hands. Sometimes he sits with him, on the bathroom floor, the dim light their only illumination, and it is some ungodly weak hour between day and night, not that Dean seems to tell these days, holding Dean against the glass, just thinking _please, please_. Sam has brought down far, far greater things these days. Why, he thinks, can’t he have this one.

After a stray cat wanders past the wards, only to meet a grisly fate between Dean’s bloody teeth, Sam brings back bloody steaks and cheap butcher’s catches. Part of him, the boy at Stanford, protests that it’s unsanitary, that they’ll grow sick, starts to reel off long lists of reasons and diseases with staccato Latin syllables, but he can feel how little that would hit either of them now. Dean’s eyes, dark still, widen when he scents the blood, his face growing soft and hungry. It relieves Sam as much as it disturbs him, and he feeds his brother with shaking fingers, scraps of bloody meat that stain his hands, all carmine as Dean sucks and laps with his lush lips and ruined tongue, rasping against Sam’s calluses.

Dean watches Sam reverently, with something that would have been love, and Sam eyes him hungrily, cuts it small, afraid to give him the knife and fork, just lets himself fall into eyes hazy dark that he dreams sometimes could be green. The color floods back into Dean’s cheeks. When he looks down, lashes drawn, he is almost himself again after a little too much sun, flushed and happy and Sam’s.

The lunge at the knife is not unexpected, but it sets everything in Sam sideways all the same, his bloody hand at Dean’s throat, painting the white skin dark. The blood is thick and copper in his nostrils as he yanks Dean’s jaw forward, quelling him, shaking him a little. The kiss is all Dean’s, no shying away, no blood drawn, but bloody all the same with his meal, running down both their jaws, thick and rich, full of life.

\--

The scars continue to heal, that eerie rasp of his own name growing more natural as the days go on. Sam checks everything ever day with clinical precision, burns each suffered mark into his head like a geography of _casi belli_. Dean seems calmer, especially when their skins meet. His lips pull up in a half smile sometime, heartbreaking in the sunlight. His eyes are unreadable though, and Sam wishes he could see them, _really_ see them.

His tongue is growing back. It’s creepy, the gory display of flesh and _wrong_ , so wrong to look at his brother like this, but it’s hope along with the old, metallic rage and bile familiar in the back of his throat. Dean is always a little cold seeming, but he still shies away from the open flame of the stove in a way that makes Sam’s teeth clench for things already done. Some days he thinks there’s gun oil and sweat and car resting beneath the cloying, fearful scent of hell, but maybe that’s only desperation. It fuels him though, makes the thing inside pulse, the one that thins Ellen’s mouth and ended Lilith’s reign.

\--

It’s fall, crisp and quick, the season of death, when the dreams begin. And not far after, he notices the scorch marks outside the wards. Something's trying to break into the house. Sam can feel where they reach back in himself, tender and sore from whatever tried to get through. He paces, stops taking calls from town. Dean’s momentary serenity, his quiet moments in the sunlight, asleep under Sam’s wide palm, begin to disintegrate. Sam knows he can feel it too, whatever it is, the way he _screams_ at night, in Sam’s dreams and then in reality when he wakes, up, a ragged, terrible noise that still sounds wrong, warped by his healing mouth, too familiar like he’s done it a thousand times. Sam does not dwell on that.

He throws himself against the wards from the inside like he did the very first day. Sam has to press him skin to skin, hold him down to calm him, scratch him up, draw rich brother’s blood, mark him. Ground him on _this_ earth, _Sam’s_ earth, not whatever’s seeping in from below, sulfur gleaming like dust motes in the air. Dean sweats and cries and writhes beneath him, Sam’s clothes limp on his body. His eyes are wide and dark and terrible in his body, already somewhere else. Everything, all of Sam’s work, all those months of healing and his brother nearly back, seem to vanish before his eyes. It’s too much. He thinks, I can’t take more. Until of course, more comes.

The marks appear in early October, when the leaves curl in their last throes to the ground, and the sky is the sharp, tile blue that hurts to stare at. They form like bruises, dark and brutal, curling up his sides, winding obscene around his legs and thick muscled thighs toward his limp cock, up his throat like hands ready to strangle. They grow blacker day by day, horrible on his brother’s pale skin, rippling sometimes like shadows waiting to take Dean, constricting him, calling him, _hurting_ him. Sam can tell this clearly enough, the way Dean whimpers and shakes as they grow, trembling and lashing out in turns, chewing his own lips bloody. His stubble grows out, because Sam can’t hold him still enough for a shave. The quiet moments in the bathroom, his hands steady on Dean’s throat, his brother trusting and silent in the scrape of razor on flesh, are barely a memory now. Sam can only sooth him, make him drink from a soaked rag, his mouth too tight from pain, listen, sleepless, as he shivers the nights away, eyes wild with pain.

“Razakel, _Razakel_ ,” he hisses now, not _Sam_ , syllables so twisted that it takes a few iterations for Sam to figure it out, to connect to the cruel, beautiful mouth and searching hands in his dream. The contract-holder. He has rarely been this angry. But this has been a season of anger.

He has to slam Dean down to quiet him, shake the terrible name from his lips, and his brother goes electric, bucks under him. Sam grabs his hair when he bites, fingers curling sweat at the roots, forces his throat back, skin mottled with dark marks, saying _mine, not yours_ , mocking, so Sam bends his own mouth over them, makes his own claim. It has taken him awhile to learn Dean’s new body, his new scars, but he _knows_ it, has washed it and put it back together and held it day in day out. Tried to put together the pieces and memories into flesh that only became real flesh slowly, under Sam’s touch, and now it’s slipping away. He wants to _force_ it under Dean’s skin, pull him back from his feral distance, eyes already somewhere else, not Sam’s, but it’s hard, so hard.

Dean hisses at his bite though, arches up that strong, pared down body, the sharp curve of his hip right against Sam’s cock, hardening quick. He’d almost forgotten about the bloody kiss, but the memory comes quickly now, his blood racing from the effort, hands tracing over every hurting mark, desperate to take it all back. If the battleground is to be his own brother’s body, his own brother’s skin, then so be it. Sam learned to play their games the day they took Dean, and he hasn’t lost his touch. He bites and slides his hands lower, between Dean’s legs, gentle and quick, soothing his brother’s cock into a red erection, wet and bouncing. Dean forces himself up into Sam’s face, mouth opening to say something, something of _his_ , but Sam swallows it brutally with a kiss, ruts blindly until they’re both yanked into the immediacy of the feverish moment, beyond wards and sulfur and bruises that are not bruises.

Dean looks down, parts his legs, _yowls_ , body opening to Sam. He imagines he can see the marks receding a little, in the red haze of his vision. Dean has never _not_ given, from the very first moment he drew breath, and even now, crazed, not himself, lost between physicality and something more terrible, he is no different. And Sam, who is boy and brother and owner now, from John Winchester’s Kansas to their own road to hell, Sam, Dean’s Sam, curly hair, round face, Stanford’s momentary hostage, Dean’s right hand, has always been ready to take.

\--

Sam does not sleep, even when Dean curls across him, face flushed, utterly exhausted. His skin still looks terrible with bruising, but his sleep appears to be calm, dreamless. He groans when they part skin, so Sam stays, standing guard, slicked in their sweat and drying come. Dean looks ruined, his eyes closed. Sam can’t help but feel guilty for his relief at that. The air is thick and silent, waiting.

Ellen leaves a message, another plea. It echoes in the house. _Please, Sam._

He tightens his fingers in Dean’s hair, strokes a hand up his thigh, past the fading bruises to his red, swollen hole, still leaking Sam’s come. He’s painted with both their marks, and Sam will not, cannot lose.

\--

The crossroads again, though the demons guarding them had long fallen to Sam’s hand. But this is no soul bargainer, no ferryman or infernal sales associate. Razakel is vaguely beautiful, a twisted form fading in and out of the shadow, marks of magic all over his body, a reminder of his human sins. His breath curls bright in the air. It tastes like power, like iron.

"You brought down your own Lilith, Samael. What's another scrap of soul to you?"

Sam remembers the way her throat became real in his hands, fleshly and apart from the little girl whose body she'd stolen, remembers how the sickly yellow of her essence had simply leeched out, the following shock that hurt his hands. _Sam_ , she’d said, an echo of Dean’s altered hiss that later came, full of something stranger and tender, turned sideways and terrible. A memory, ancient, now sour on his tongue.

"He's not yours." He makes his voice firm, lets whatever's otherwordly in it echo loudly in the open space.

The weeds by the road sway. The sky is gray. He keeps his hand on the back of Dean’s neck when he stirs, makes little sounds. Razakel smiles, slow and terrible, a curl of lips not lips that draws the clouds down. Dean screams into his welcoming curve, straining forward until he’s practically crawling, the bruises, the marks, growing dark and certain again on his skin. Sam has to grip his hair, yank him back with an exposed throat, head neatly on Sam’s thigh. Sam’s to keep.

“I’ve already had him,” the too-human lips curl wider at him. “And he was very sweet, Samael, _giving_. I only want what’s mine by contract.”

He can feel Razakel fighting him, but the pulse inside is not whatever he used on Lilith, the wild fuel that’s kept him going these years. It’s the memory of what he wants back, what he has perhaps always wanted but didn’t always know. He needs it, Dean vital and warm and _himself_ , needs it like he’s never needed anything. It makes his old arguments with his father seem tiny and trivial, the desire to leave hardly a desire at all in the face of this.

Razakel takes a step back, clearly startled. Sam does not yield, and when Dean’s eyes open again, his face still wrecked, but his tremors calming, they are a clear and lambent green.

\--

"What brought you back?" Bobby is suspicious, especially of Dean, thinner than he was, ragged and brutal, his face all gaunt and pale, lurking behind Sam like a scrap of a soul. He's whole again, as whole as Sam could make him, the scars fading a little, his joints both more and less fluid. His eyes, Sam could stare at his eyes for days, never realized how much he'd used Dean's before they were swallowed by something else. His tongue is still tender to him; he uses it sparingly, and only to Sam, but the humor is back snapping in his gaze, and that settles Sam when nothing else does. So warm it’s a presence at his back.

Sam rolls his neck, tightens his hands. Ellen looks nervous next to Bobby. There are new faces, ones he doesn't recognize. They do not look at him kindly.

"Does it matter?"

His hand closes around Dean's wrist, bone and sinew, _solid_ , almost without meaning to, each finger fanning down to lock his brother in place, strengthen him and take strength from him. He's never felt more ready, everything he needs by his side, something swelling within himself. Dean is warm, beautifully warm.

"Ready for what?"

Ellen narrows her eyes. Her hair has a little more gray now, but she's still strong, square face set, dark eyes intent on Sam as if the shotgun were in her hands. He remembers her ragged voice on the phone those terrible days with his brother screaming under Razakel’s mark. Waiting. He's no longer her boy, he realizes, John's sloe-eyed, glancing boy, who stooped and shied away and let his brother take center stage. She still startles him though. He didn't realize the words had flown from his mouth.

But the reply, the reply is steady, sure as the skin warm beneath his fingers, Dean's own gaze on his back, coiled sinew at Sam's back. Won hard with Sam’s own blood. Sword arm and heart, everything he’s ever wanted.

"War."

 

\--


End file.
